Description

One of the main obstacles to productivity today is the
growing problem of information overload. Information
overload results because we lack effective tools for
automatically organizing information collections into
meaningful and relevant chunks.

ChangeThis Y Save to disk  Hide/Show menus D E Measuring the Physical Properties of Memes A Physics of Ideas “One of the main obstacles to productivity today is the growing problem of information overload. Information overload results because we lack eﬀective tools for automatically organizing information collections into meaningful and relevant chunks.” continued > GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto is toner-friendly: the backgrounds wonʼt print on paper and are only visible on-screen to aid by Nova Spivack readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| f X Not using Adobe Acrobat? Please go to http://changethis.com/content/reader NEXT

ChangeThis Introduction This paper provides an overview of a new approach to measuring the physical proper- This article is reprinted ties of ideas as they move in real-time through information spaces and populations with permission from such as the Internet. It has applications to search, information ﬁltering, personaliza- the author from: tion, ad targeting, knowledge discovery and text-mining, market research, trend http://mindingtheplanet.net analysis, intelligence gathering, organizational behavior and social/cultural studies. One of the main obstacles to productivity today is the growing problem of information overload. Information overload results because we lack eﬀective tools for automatical- ly organizing information collections into meaningful and relevant chunks. For many years I have been thinking about a new way to approach this problem that is based on some ideas in classical physics. For quite some time I didn't say anything about it because it seemed like good material for a patent, but now I've decided it would be better to just put this in the public domain since I would rather have it be prior-art than patented by anyone. This is fundamental and useful and everyone should beneﬁt from it. In this article I propose the beginning of what might be called quot;a physics of ideas.quot; My approach is based on mapping classical physics to memes that move through GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto information spaces over time. The key to this is to measure the momentum of ideas is toner-friendly: as they move through space and time, and thus the momentums of documents that the backgrounds contain them. This provides a means to quantify the strength and trajectory of ideas wonʼt print on paper as they move through a given corpus (and by inference, through the populations that and are only visible create and consume the documents in that corpus) — and this enables us to start on-screen to aid readability. applying classical physics to empirically measure and understand the dynamics of | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h f 2/36 X

ChangeThis ideas that are shaping our world. In other words, we can start to objectively analyze interactions between ideas as well as the impact that various ideas have on people, organizations and events in the quot;real worldquot; and in turn the impact that those things have back on ideas. Ideas are perhaps the single most powerful force shaping our world today, other than the climate. Humanity's behaviors are nothing but the results of various ideas — the phenotype of the ideas that are actually at work in the population at a given time. This is true for any organization, and even for individuals — ultimately much if not all of their behavior is conditioned by their ideas. So if we can form a science of ideas that enables us to begin to quantify and analyze their dynamics, we can start to gain new insights into human behavior and the quot;hiddenquot; forces shaping our world today. My approach is to ﬁnd a way to map what is going on in the realm of ideas to existing methods in classical physics — I want to make it possible to treat ideas as ideal par- ticles in a Newtonian universe. It may then be possible to use the wealth of techniques that physicists have developed for analyzing the dynamics of particle systems to un- derstand the dynamics of ideas within and between individuals and groups. BACKGROUND GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto is toner-friendly: But ﬁrst some background about how I came up with this idea…In 1993 I worked as the backgrounds an analyst at Individual, Inc., back in the pre-Web days. In that job I was part of a wonʼt print on paper sophisticated information ﬁlter. Individual published ﬁltered personalized newsfeeds. and are only visible They aggregated content from thousands of sources and then ﬁltered it into strategic on-screen to aid readability. newsfeeds tailored to the interests of their customers. You may have used Newspage | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h f 3/36 X

ChangeThis or Heads Up, in the past. Chances are, if you did, I was your analyst. The way that the Individual system worked was that ﬁrst a set of AI agents did a ﬁrst pass on the in- coming content to sort it into buckets. These buckets were routed to a team of human analysts with expertise in the relevant ﬁelds. The analysts would then go through the articles in the buckets to prioritize them, remove duplicates or items that had come through in previous articles as well as items that did not belong, and add in any items that should be included. I want to make it possible to treat ideas as ideal particles in a Newtonian universe. What this meant in practical terms for me as an analyst was that every night from about 8 PM until 1 AM I had to personally read through around 1600 news articles. My beat was emerging technology, software, broadband, online-services, multimedia and satellite applications, so I enjoyed it (yes, I am a serious news hound!). But still it was a challenge to keep on top of such a ﬁre hose. Not only did I have to ﬁgure out what was important and how to prioritize it, but I also had to remember if I had ever seen and GO AHEAD AND PRINT published anything about a given subject before in the previous year. By trial and error I THIS. This manifesto evolved a solution to this problem. In summary, what I realized was that whether or not is toner-friendly: something is relevant is much more subtle than merely keyword matching! the backgrounds wonʼt print on paper A good example can be found in nature — speciﬁcally frogs. Frogs have interesting and are only visible visual systems. They are tuned to focus on things that move. They are most sensitive to on-screen to aid size and velocity, but they also notice changes in velocity. Things that are small and that readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h f 4/36 X Want to ﬁnd the most buzzworthy manifestos? DISCOVER them here.

ChangeThis don't move are not of particular interest to them. Things that move in erratic ways are most interesting. Humans are slightly more sophisticated — we notice momentum, a measure of the quot;massquot; or quot;sizequot; of things and the way they change over time. Every night from about 8PM until 1AM, I had to personally read through around 1600 news articles. What I realized at Individual back in 1993 was that the way I ﬁgured out what articles to prioritize was not so diﬀerent from how a frog ﬁnds ﬂies to eat — but more so- phisticated. I realized that I ﬁlter information according to the momentums of ideas (or quot;memesquot;) — how the various memes in the articles I was reading were moving through space and time in the culture I lived in and the communities I was interested in. Here is a formula that provides an overview of my heuristic for ﬁltering news articles: Rank of item (such as an article) in a list = function of (keyword relevancy of item to query, reputation of publisher or source, date of publication, relevancy of source to query, 'document momentum' of item with respect to memes in corpus). GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto The last item, quot;document momentumquot; is the key to it all. The document momentum is toner-friendly: is a measure of the cumulative real-time momentum of the memes that occur in the the backgrounds document. This requires some explanation. The rest of this article describes how to wonʼt print on paper measure the momentum of a meme and compute the document momentum for a and are only visible document, and how this can be useful for a number of information tasks. on-screen to aid readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h f 5/36 X

ChangeThis MEMES First of all what is a meme (pronounced “meem”)? — basically it's any idea, any concept. More formally, a decent deﬁnition of a meme is: quot;/meem/ [coined on analogy with `gene' by Richard Dawkins] n. An idea considered as a {replicator}, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase `meme complex' denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the `hacker subculture' meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, `meme' is often misused to mean `meme complex'. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers ﬁnd this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.quot; (Deﬁnition from: The Hacker's Dictionary) Memes are essential to the way the human brain processes ideas and how it decides what is important. We are basically quot;meme processorsquot; — we are quot;life-support systems for memesquot; to put it another way. To use a computer analogy, our physical bodies are like the hardware and operating system, and our minds — the dynamical activity and state of this hardware — are like the software applications and content running on the GO AHEAD AND PRINT hardware. Our minds could be viewed as systems of interacting memes — complex THIS. This manifesto systems of ideas that interact within us, and across our relationships. is toner-friendly: the backgrounds Memes are capable of spreading across human social relationships, via human inter- wonʼt print on paper and are only visible and via human interactions with static storage vehicles such as printed media, actions, on-screen to aid or video, and digital storage media — they are highly quot;communicable.quot; (And audio readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h f 6/36 X

ChangeThis soon, as I have proposed in other articles, with the coming Semantic Web memes will be able to spread and interact without needing humans at all — machines will be able to process them on their own.) Because memes spread and even appear to evolve over time there has been some discussion about using biological metaphors and ideas from population biology and evolutionary theory to analyze memes. I think these techniques are deﬁnitely useful for doing macro-memetics. What I am proposing here is a way to start doing micro- memetics — to understand what is happening precisely for each meme at any level of granularity. WHAT MAKES A MEME quot;HOTquot;? One of the many interesting skills that humans have but that computers are so far not able to replicate very well is the ability to quot;intuitivelyquot; ﬁgure out what is important in a complex set of information — we humans are excellent at detecting patterns in complex information. We are good at tracking and measuring memes. But more sig- niﬁcantly we are excellent at picking out the most important memes, even in highly cluttered, chaotic and noisy environments. We do this naturally all the time. But how? GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto is toner-friendly:minds Our experience thousands of memes every day — But how exactly do we decide which memes are more important at a given time, relative to all the other the backgrounds wonʼt print on paper For example, how do we ﬁgure out that something is a quot;hotquot; trend? We may memes? and are only visible mentioned casually in conversation, read it in an article, see it on the Web, etc. hear it on-screen to aidwhat determines whether we decide it is important and quot;hot?” It is not merely the But readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h f 7/36 X Send this to a friend. CLICK HERE.

ChangeThis total number of times that memes related to it have been mentioned (what we might call the quot;massquot; of the meme) — that just tells you how quot;bigquot; the memes are but not how quot;hotquot; or quot;forcefulquot; they are relative to other memes. Furthermore quot;hotnessquot; is not merely the velocity or frequency of new mentions per unit time — while this is useful, velocity alone doesn't say much about relative importance of memes. Acceleration of memes — the change in velocity — is also useful but not enough. What we really need is a method that relates the quot;sizequot; of a meme to the way it moves in space and time. In other words, in order to determine whether a meme is quot;hotquot; we need a way to measure its 'meme momentum' — we need a physics of ideas. THE MEDIA IS THE MIRROR: IDENTIFYING THE REFLECTIONS OF MEMES Before we can measure the physical properties of memes, we need a way to identify the memes we are interested in analyzing. We can identify memes by analyzing tex- tual media such as document collections, wire services, and the Web. — they are frozen digital representa- THE MEMES WITHIN TEXT APPEAR TO BE DORMANT GO AHEAD AND PRINT tions of memes. They do not move or reproduce on their own — they need help from THIS. This manifesto humans (for the moment). But by inference, static textual representations of memes is toner-friendly: provide a mirror of the actual quot;live memesquot; that are taking place in the minds of the the backgrounds wonʼt print on paperwho author and consume that media. By analyzing textual media we are not people and are only visible looking at the memetic properties of text, we are looking at the memetic merely properties of people's minds and of organizations, societies and cultures. on-screen to aid readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h f 8/36 X

ChangeThis — the Media is a mirror of the mind and its culture. By ana- THE MEDIA IS THE MIRROR lyzing suitably selected information sources (for example, quot;all news articles from USA newspapersquot;) we can eﬀectively focus on a reﬂection of the memes that are actually present within the minds of humans in a particular place, time, industry, community, demographic, etc. The more we know about the information sources, the more we can infer about the memes we ﬁnd, and thus the memes taking place within the minds of the people who interact with those information sources. We really need a method that relates the size of a meme to the way it moves in space and time. The simplest approach to identifying memes in textual media is to simply pre-specify a list of memes we are interested in and to then search for any matching strings. For example we might be interested in measuring memes related to a particular trend, such as quot;Java technology,quot; so we could compile a list of terms related to Java and then use search techniques to locate all instances of those terms. We can then measure their properties. GO AHEAD AND PRINT A more sophisticated approach than specifying interesting memes in advance is to THIS. This manifesto discover them empirically by analyzing text to see what's there. To do this we might is toner-friendly: the backgrounds automatically identify nouns or noun-phrases and then measure their dynamics to see wonʼt print on paper whether they are interesting enough to warrant further analysis. There are many ex- and are only visible isting computational linguistics techniques for isolating parts of speech and linguistic on-screen to aid expressions. readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h f 9/36 X

ChangeThis Each of these nouns or phrases is a potential meme (we may consider them to all be actual memes or we may ﬁlter for only those memes that exhibit dynamics in space and time that meet our threshold for what constitutes quot;interestingquot; or quot;memelikequot; behav- ior. Another, more brute-force approach, would be to simply analyze every noun and phrase in a document or corpus for any that exhibit quot;memelikequot; dynamics in order to discover memes empirically instead of specifying them and then gathering their stats. We can use various standard methods from text-mining and natural language processing to do a smarter job of identifying memes. We can use various standard methods from text-mining and natural language pro- cessing to do a smarter job of identifying memes (for example, we can use stemming to consolidate various forms of the same word, we can use translation to consolidate expressions of the same meme in diﬀerent languages, and we can use conceptual clustering and even ontologies to consolidate diﬀerent memes that are equivalent GO AHEAD AND the same underlying meme). But for now, we can start by identifying memes in a to PRINT THIS. This manifestoway — the same way we might identify quot;topicsquot; or quot;keywordsquot; in a document. simple is toner-friendly: we can do this we can then measure the physical properties of those memes as Once the backgrounds move through time and various spaces of interest. they wonʼt print on paper and are only visible We (Note: don't necessarily have to analyze every document in a corpus to gather valid statistics for memes within it. We can use random sampling techniques for arbitrary on-screen to aid readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 10/36 f X Be ﬁrst in line to get our newest manifestos. SIGN UP for our newsletter.

ChangeThis degrees of accuracy if we wish to optimize for faster results and less computation. Instead of analyzing every occurrence of each meme, we can analyze a statistically valid sample of the corpus.) A PHYSICS OF IDEAS I suggest that the physics of ideas will be quite similar, if not equivalent to, the phys- ics of the natural world. Everything in the universe emerges from the same underlying laws, even memes. The intellectual processes taking place within our own minds, as well as across our relationships and social organizations are similar to the dynamics of particle systems, ﬂuid ﬂows, gasses, and galaxies. We should therefore be able to map existing physical knowledge to the memescape, the dimension of memes. Here are a set of basic measurements of the physical properties of memes and documents: Absolute meme mass = how quot;largequot; the meme is = the total number of times it is » mentioned in the corpus since the beginning of time to the present. (Note: When computing meme mass, we can choose to count repeat mentions or ignore them GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto doing so has slightly diﬀerent eﬀects on the algorithm. We can also, if we wish, — is toner-friendly: get more fancy and look at clusters of memes that relate to the same concepts in the backgrounds order to compute quot;concept-cluster momentumsquot; but that is not required.) wonʼt print on paper » Absolute meme velocity = how fast the meme is moving in the corpus in the present and are only visible time interval = The rate of occurrences (or quot;mentionsquot;) of the meme per unit time on-screen to aid (minutes, hours, days, etc.) in the present time interval. readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 11/36 f X

ChangeThis Absolute meme momentum = the force or importance of the meme in the corpus = » the meme's absolute mass x the meme's absolute velocity. Relative meme mass = the mass of a meme within a subset of documents or data » in the corpus representing some set of interests. (Note: we call a subset of mutually co-relevant documents a quot;reference framequot; or a quot;context.quot;) such as a set of interests, a particular period in time, etc. (rather than in the entire corpus). Relative meme velocity = the velocity of a meme within a reference frame. » Relative meme momentum = the relative meme mass X the relative meme velocity. » On the basis of these we can then compute derivatives such as: Absolute meme acceleration = how the absolute meme velocity is changing in the » entire corpus = The change in absolute velocity per unit time of the meme in the corpus. GO AHEAD AND» Relative meme acceleration = the change in relative velocity of a meme. PRINT THIS. This manifesto is toner-friendly: Absolute meme impulse = the change in importance per unit time = the change in a » the backgrounds meme's absolute momentum. wonʼt print on paper and are only visible » Relative meme impulse = the change of a meme's relative momentum. on-screen to aid readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 12/36 f X

ChangeThis Next, we use the above concepts to look at sets of memes, for example documents: Absolute document momentum = the force or importance of a document in the en- » tire corpus = the sum of the absolute momentums of each meme that occurs in the document. (Note: we may choose to count or ignore repeat occurrences of an article in diﬀerent locations or at diﬀerent times — this has diﬀerent eﬀects). Relative document momentum = the force or importance of a document within a » reference frame = the sum of the relative meme momentums in the document. This is a more contextually sensitive measure of document momentum — it couples mo- mentum more tightly with a context, such as a particular query or time interval, or demographic segment. (Note: we may choose to count or ignore repeat occurrences of an article in diﬀerent locations or at diﬀerent times — this has diﬀerent eﬀects). Hybrid document momentum = a measure of momentum that combines both relative » and absolute measurements = either relative mass X absolute velocity or absolute mass X relative velocity. HOW TO ANALYZE A CORPUS USING THESE METHODS GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto We can then apply the above measurements to entire corpora (collections of docu- is toner-friendly: ments). This enables us to empirically rank the ideas occurring in the corpus in any the backgrounds wonʼt print on paper of time. Furthermore it enables us to rank and prioritize documents in the interval and are only visible according to their momentums within any time interval — in other words, how corpus on-screen to aid representative they are of quot;importantquot; or quot;timelyquot; ideas within any time interval. readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 13/36 f X Want to ﬁnd the most buzzworthy manifestos? DISCOVER them here.

ChangeThis To do this, ﬁrst we must create an index of stats for all memes we are interested in. We can use the above mentioned techniques for identifying memes to do this. For each meme we identify, we create a record in our index that lists the stats we ﬁnd for it by source location and time. We then analyze our text sources and update the records in this table (for a historical analysis we do this all at once; for a real-time analysis we do it continuously on an ongoing basis or in batches). As new instances of memes are found we append the corresponding records in the index. Looking at the impulse (the change in momentum) we can also chart the direction of these trends (increasing or decreasing). We can now use these statistics to plot memes and documents according to our mea- surements of meme and document mass and velocity. This enables us to segment the memes or documents according to the various possible conﬁgurations of these dimensions. Each of these conﬁgurations has a useful meaning, for example a docu- ment with low absolute mass, moderate or high relative mass, high absolute velocity GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto relative velocity contains quot;newly emerging trends of interest to the current and high contextquot; whereas a document with high absolute mass, low relative mass, high abso- is toner-friendly: the backgrounds velocity and low relative velocity contains quot;established large trends that are not lute wonʼt print on paper very relevant to the current context.quot; and are only visible on-screen to aid readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 14/36 f X

ChangeThis By looking at the impulse (the change in momentum) we can also chart the direction of these trends (increasing or decreasing). Memes that have high positive impulse are becoming more quot;importantquot; than those with lower impulses. This enables us to deter- mine whether memes are quot;heating upquot; or quot;cooling oﬀquot; — a meme is heating up if it is important and timely and has positive impulse. These techniques provide a way to rank documents that is in some respects like Google’s algorithm, except that it works for all types of information. Thus documents that have high document momentums contain memes that have high meme momentums — in other words they are representative of whatever ideas hap- pen to be most important now. Tomorrow, when the momentums of various memes may have changed, the same documents might have diﬀerent document momentums. These techniques provide a way to rank documents that is in some respects like GO AHEAD AND PRINT Google's algorithm, except that it works for all types of information — not just informa- THIS. This manifesto tion that is highly interlinked with hotlinks or citations but even for ﬂat text — and it is is toner-friendly: capable of arbitrary resolution in time and space. For example, Google is basically esti- the backgrounds wonʼt print on paperdocument popularity — or eﬀectively, endorsements implied by citations — for mating each query. Google determines the rank of a page in a set of results by estimating the and are only visible community endorsement of that page as implied by the number of relevant pages that on-screen to aid readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 15/36 f X

ChangeThis link to it. Using the proposed physics of ideas however we can accomplish the same thing in a diﬀerent and possibly better way — we can now compute the 'potential com- munity value' of a document — without actually requiring links in order to ﬁgure that out. Instead, we can determine the relative strength of the ideas (the memes) that are present in the document and compare them to the memes that are present in the com- munity of documents that are relevant to the keywords in our query. For example, we do a query for quot;space tourismquot; and get back 6,830,000 documents in Google. Next we compute the above stats for each of those documents. We then rank the documents returned by this query according to their relative document mo- mentums. This has the eﬀect of ranking the documents according to the strengths of memes that are particularly of interest to the community represented by the query results. Thus it enables us to rank the resulting documents for our quot;space tourismquot; query to favor those documents that contain the highest momentum memes relative to set of memes that matter to the community — in other words the documents that contain ideas that are most quot;timely for the communityquot; would appear higher. So this is a way to ﬁgure out not just what is relevant but what is important or in other words timely at a given point in time to people with a given set of interests. GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto EXAMPLE APPLICATIONS is toner-friendly: the backgrounds Using the above techniques we can use momentum to provide a more sensitive way wonʼt print on paper to ﬁlter any collection of information objects for which we can gather stats represent- and are only visible ing mass and velocity. There are numerous useful applications of doing this. Below I on-screen to aid readability. describe some of them. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 16/36 f X Send this to a friend. CLICK HERE.

ChangeThis Filtering E-Mail For example, one might ﬁlter their e-mail using meme and document momentums in order to automatically view messages, people and topics with high momentum, low momentum, growing or declining momentum, etc. One could also use these techniques to data-mine the articles in a news feed or corpus for those that contain the quot;hottest trends.quot; It could be used to automatically detect quot;emerging hot topics,quot; quot;people to watch,quot; quot;companies to watch,quot; quot;products or brands to watch,quot; etc. When ever you send a message the system measures the memes in that message and up- dates a special meme-stats index called quot;my interestsquot; which just has the meme-stats for memes in messages you send. All incoming e-mail messages you receive can then be ranked according to their document momentums with respect to the meme momentums in the quot;my interestsquot; index. This e-mail ﬁlter is automatically adaptive — as you send messages it learns what your current interest priorities are and this is reﬂected in changing meme momentums, even as your interests shift over time. These updated momentums are then used to ﬁlter incoming mail. So your mail ﬁlter learns what is important to you as you work and adapts to focus on your current priorities and interests, without you having to teach it. It just learns and adapts to model your GO AHEAD AND PRINT interests as you work. current THIS. This manifesto Media Analysis is toner-friendly: the backgrounds Beyond just that, these techniques can be used to perform more precise media analy- wonʼt print on paper sis — for example they can be applied to measure the success of an advertising or and are only visible marketing campaign by correlating the campaign placements with changes in mo- on-screen to aid readability. mentum of the memes for the brand or product in the media. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 17/36 f X

ChangeThis Predicting Changes to a Stock Price We can also use these techniques to make predictions — for example, we can corre- late meme momentums for memes related to a company with technical properties of its ﬁnancials and stock price and then make predictions about price changes by ana- lyzing news articles to detect changing meme momentums related to the company. We can also do pure statistical correlations between meme momentums and stock momentums for example. The ﬁnancial news media is like a mirror reﬂecting what is taking place in the markets — but investors also use this mirror to decide what to do in the markets. So by measuring what appears in this mirror we can predict what investors are likely to do next. Prioritizing Search Results and Implicit Query Expansion We can also use these techniques to prioritize Internet search results — or any search results for that matter. For example, a set of Web documents can be prioritized by their document momentums, such that those that represent the memes that are cur- rently the hottest can score higher — in other words, documents that are currently more timely can score higher than those that are less timely, and documents that are more timely yet less relevant (on a keyword level) can be ranked higher than those GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto less timely but more keyword-relevant. that are is toner-friendly: For example, suppose you search for quot;Asian restaurant.quot; If the meme quot;Vietnamese the backgrounds wonʼt print on paper currently in vogue in the media, meaning that it has higher momentum cur- foodquot; is and are only visible then documents about restaurants that contain quot;Asianquot; or quot;restaurantquot; and that rently, on-screen to aid contain quot;Vietnamese foodquot; will score higher than those that only mention quot;Asianquot; or readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 18/36 f X

ChangeThis quot;restaurant” and quot;Chinese foodquot; (assuming that Chinese food currently has a lower momentum). But this could change later as trends change. In other words, although we searched for quot;Asian foodquot; we ended up getting documents ranked not merely by the keywords quot;Asian foodquot; but by what topics related to Asian food have highest momentum today. This is a form of quot;implicit query expansionquot; and quot;implicit ﬁltering.quot; In other words the system can prioritize search results for you according to the pres- ent momentums or in other words, the timeliness, of memes that occur in them. So it can show you the documents that are likely to be most important to you NOW in light of current trends and events, versus just the documents that have the best keyword relevancy. Market Research To make things even more interesting, we can add additional arguments to our quot;Rank of itemquot; function and our meme-stats table — for example, not just a measure of mentions but also a measure of quot;hitsquot; — hits on a meme increase whenever a docu- ment containing the meme is viewed. We can also add another dimension to represent the spatial distribution of memes. This will enable us to track the vectors of memes through time and space. We can do this by associating each source (each publisher) GO AHEAD AND PRINT with a geographic location. We then segment our meme-stats table by geography to THIS. This manifesto is toner-friendly: out the momentum of each meme in each geographic region. This enables us to break do things like ﬁlter documents by quot;how important they are to people in New York.quot; the backgrounds wonʼt print on paper By adding further dimensions — such as demographic proﬁles gleaned for example and are only visible on-screen to aid the reader-surveys of publishers we can also segment by demographics, from readability. so we can even ﬁlter documents by quot;how important they are in the last month to | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 19/36 f X Be ﬁrst in line to get our newest manifestos. SIGN UP for our newsletter.

ChangeThis professional, Democratic party aﬃliated, college educated, women in New York City who earn a median household income of $100,000.quot; The system can prioritize search results for you according to the present momentums. By adding still one more dimension to measure quot;sentimentquot; for each mention of a meme (as a function of the positive or negative language occurring near it or better yet, about it), we can even start to rank memes according to the percent of members of a given population that support or oppose them. In other words, this system can be used to empirically measure what polls and focus groups do informally. The notion here is that by selecting media sources that are representative of the community you are interested in understanding; you can then view memes and meme data relative to that group. You can also do this in the other direction, simply look to discover what memes have interesting stats for the group your are interested in. Another use of this technology might be to analyze intellectual history by computing meme-stats from historical documents or past news articles. GO AHEAD AND PRINT We can also leverage the fact that meme dynamics can be correlated with those of THIS. This manifesto is toner-friendly: memes to determine dynamical dependencies amongst them. This enables us to other the backgrounds determine that some memes positively or negatively reinforce others. It also enables wonʼt print on paper us to discover sets of related memes — such that we can learn that stats on a given and are only visible meme should be inherited by related quot;child memesquot; in an automatically or manually on-screen to aid generated taxonomy of memes. readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 20/36 f X

ChangeThis Measuring and Mapping Ideas in the Semantic Web We could also reference metadata about the semantics of various memes. We can even ﬁlter for various types of memes — such as quot;memes related to vehiclesquot; or quot;memes representing peoplequot; or quot;memes representing products ,quot; etc. This enables us to start measuring ideas as they occur and interact on the emerging Semantic Web — but not just particular memes, even conceptual systems of memes that are interacting or somehow ontologically related. By linking with an ontology, for example, we can track the momentum of all memes related to quot;American carsquot; versus those for quot;German cars.quot; The ontology enables inferences that help us ﬁnd all memes that represent types of cars and classify them by nationality of manufacture. Detecting Terrorist Activity These techniques might even be used to detect signs of potential terrorism, and to quot;get inside the mindsquot; of various people or groups of interest — simply analyze the meme-stats for memes in documents they create or view to automatically generate a proﬁle of the main ideas currently occupying their minds. Next by tracking this over time you can start to plot trajectories and make predictions. Intelligent agents can GO AHEAD AND PRINT trained to notice quot;interestingquot; patterns in these trajectories and alert analysts then be THIS. This manifesto as needed. is toner-friendly: the backgrounds Targeting Ads wonʼt print on paper The same methods could be used to better target advertisements or recommenda- and are only visible on-screen to aid to users. Knowing what memes are currently most important to a party enables tions readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 21/36 f X

ChangeThis better personalization and targeting. In this case a Web site could track what memes are hottest for a given user account — derived from what pages they view and what messages they write or respond to. This data could then be used to augment the users' interest proﬁle with more dimensions of detail about each interest — such as how timely it is to the user, what particular nuances are speciﬁcally interesting, what their sentiment is. This could result in less irrelevance and spam for users and better results for marketers. Knowledge Discovery Now what gets interesting is the above methods can be used on both directions. We can use them to ask questions about memes we are interested in and we can also use to empirically discover memes we should be interested in within any corpus. So for example we can just empirically compute meme momentums and document momen- tums in any collection of information and then ﬁlter for whatever dynamics we are interested in, for example, quot;hot new emerging trends to watch.quot; A New Kind of Portal Using these methods it is possible to build a new kind of portal that provides a win- GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto the collective mind of the planet (or any community of interest). It would dow into is toner-friendly: what people within the desired segment think is important over time. We could show the backgrounds an animation on it of how memes for quot;jihadquot; have spread, or for how those for a watch wonʼt print on paper technology like quot;Javaquot; have spread versus those for quot;Microsoft .Net,quot; or how a particu- and are only visible lar war is currently viewed by the public in diﬀerent states or diﬀerent demographic on-screen to aid readability. | iss. 7.03 | i | U | |+| h 22/36 f X What are the most talked about manifestos? FIND out here.

ChangeThis segments. A user could quot;drill downquot; into any meme to see its stats, all articles where it was mentioned, and related items on the Web, and maybe even products etc. Open Questions & Directions for Further Research It is important to note that these simple physical concepts could be taken much further. For example, using the above appro

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